Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/372

 356 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

But, secondly, closely related to the objections of the historian and probably helping to define the meaning of my reply to them, there are the rather more positive objections of political science, which finds my understanding of the social will at variance with its conception of sovereignty. Clearly sover- eignty and will must be coextensive, but the political scientist is accustomed to think of individual peoples as possessing each its own independent and indivisible sovereignty, very much as in ethics independent, indivisible wills are often ascribed to separate persons ; and to make the will of society one and all- inclusive, to seem actually to ignore the existence of separate and often conflicting states or nations or races, is to run counter to his well-set habit of mind. But habits of mind, however set themselves, have never yet unsettled real things, and a localized will or sovereignty, a sovereignty of specific area and duration, and so of specific power, cannot be independent and indivisible, as these terms seem to me to be used ; rather it is limited, and it shares its authority and activity with other times and places and other powers. The only real sovereignty is that of the social whole. A localized physical force is not more seriously self-contradictory than a localized sovereignty. How several nations, for example, can be looked upon at one moment as each possessing an independent sovereignty and at another moment as parties under an international law, and possibly also at a third moment as politically as well as personally and practically nterested in so inclusive a thing as natural law, as if each of the nations had their distinct spheres to live in, I cannot see. Such divisions make only so many different states of subjection ; they do not make independence.

The political scientist, however, insists, as his last resort, that practically he needs these distinctions and limitations ; practi- cally, with the lawyer, he must have his fictions. So are we again confronted with old friends, practice and theory, and yet it quite suffices for our purposes that "practice" is admitted to rest on the fictitious. And we cannot but ask that those who appeal to it take care that they neither hide fact nor waive responsibility, whether intellectual or moral. Moreover, they